#society

Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society. ↗

— Rowan D. Williams

#average #coming #economists #health #income

I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things. ↗

— Karl Pilkington

#ageing #death #discrimination #humour #life

A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching. ↗

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

#act #civil #civil society #heart #liberal

There is something about veganism that is not easy, but the difficulty is not inherent in veganism, but in our culture. ↗

— Will Tuttle

#veganism #diet

Empathy...must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. ↗

— Philip K Dick

#predator #prey #society #diet

-The very absence of the freedom to criticise against your own or any other government is all the more a reason to loudly shout-out for democracy! If that is wrong, Drew boldly went on, -then I would rather be wrong then to be numbered among the majority of the so-called righteous people whose only mandate seems to be controlling people. If a government is against its people expressing themselves, then that government is obviously hiding something criminal from its people and the world, and it is therefore afraid of being exposed and losing whatever power it has. ↗

— Andrew James Pritchard

#individual-freedom #repression #society #freedom

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience. ↗

— Barack Obama

#justice #law #law-school #society #dreams

At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents... ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#society #television #family

We run to place and power over the dead bodies of those who fail and fall; ay, we win the food we eat from out the mouths of starving babes. ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#cost #crime #give-and-take #good-and-evil #humanity

It was before him again in its completeness -- the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom to act which never made for romance. The strident setting of the restaurant, in which their table seemed set apart in a special glare of publicity, and the presence at it of little Dabham of the "Riviera Notes," emphasized the ideals of a world where conspicuousness passed for distinction, and the society column had become the roll of fame. ↗

— Edith Wharton

#food